Donald Trump is trying to revoke the citizenship this country gave a Somali child.
Last week Homeland Security agents walked into Ilhan Omar’s home in Washington and took her phone, her computers, her notebooks, and her passport. A sitting member of Congress. A girl who came here from a Somalia at war with itself in 1995, who grew up here, went to school here, became a citizen here, was elected here, is raising her children here. They took the one small book that says a person may leave and come home. This was not a check of paperwork. Every undocumented neighbor I have ever sat with understood the message in it immediately: your belonging here is conditional, and the condition is my goodwill.
Then Tom Homan said aloud what the warrant had already said: that she could “of course” be denaturalized and deported. Federal authorities have been building this case against her citizenship for months, and the search of her home was the display, not the first step.
The formal question, if it ever becomes a formal charge, concerns a year. On the paperwork tied to her father’s naturalization — the event by which she became one of us — the age recorded did not, the theory goes, match her real birth date. The claim being circulated is that she was eighteen and not seventeen. A year on a form. That is the thread by which the government now proposes to unmake a lifetime of belonging, and it should be said plainly that no one arrives at a warrant for a congresswoman’s passport by accident. Somebody decided this was worth the whole weight of the federal government.
I want to say what I believe plainly, and I want to say it about my own house first. The machine being pointed at Ilhan Omar is not something Donald Trump built. It is a machine we have all been letting be built for a century, by both parties, in both chambers, with the quiet consent of most of our congregations. Adam Goodman’s history of deportation puts numbers on it: roughly eight million formal removals over the past hundred years, and something closer to fifty million more accomplished through “voluntary” departure, which is to say through fear. Every president in modern memory has run it. I have sat in pews where we complained about it in general terms and then voted as though it were somebody else’s problem. And when a politician wraps a removal in the language of law and order and a congregation applauds, that is a religious act, and it needs to be named as one. We who claim the gospel and live in this country helped make this machinery ordinary. That confession is owed. It is not permission.
What is new is not the machine. What is new is who it is aimed at, and why. Trump and his allies have discussed stripping this woman of her citizenship and expelling her from the country, and the stated reason is that she has been an outspoken critic of the president of the United States. Barack Obama put it in a sentence on Sunday: the full weight of the federal government is coming down on a law-abiding elected official because she dared to criticize the president. He is right about that, and I will say the next thing even though it costs me something to say it. Obama is not exempt from this accounting. He ran the most efficient removal apparatus any president has built in modern memory, and immigration advocates spent those years calling him a deporter in chief, and they were not wrong. Both facts belong in the same paragraph. The machine he operated is now in other hands, and the fact that it predates this president does not make it any less his. It makes his use of it a choice he owns completely.
And the country has a long habit of this. Trump spent years demanding Barack Obama’s birth certificate, and Obama produced two records proving what was always true, and the question did not die because the facts were good — it died slowly, grudgingly, and it left a mark on the country’s self-respect that has never fully healed. What birtherism did with a microphone, this is being done with a warrant. I will not pretend the two are unrelated, and I will not let either of them become the argument. The argument is whether citizenship in this United States is a fact or a favor, and whether a president may reach into a person’s file and take it away because he does not like what she says from the floor of the House.
The traditions this column draws on do not leave that question open.
Exodus: “You shall not wrong or oppress a resident alien, for you were aliens in the land of Egypt.” Leviticus: the alien who resides with you shall be to you as the citizen among you; you shall love the alien as yourself. Deuteronomy, more plainly than almost anything in scripture: God executes justice for the orphan and the widow and loves the stranger, providing food and clothing. The command to love the sojourner appears in the Torah more often than nearly any other — thirty times and more, if you count them — and the reason given every single time is memory. You know what it is to be the one who just arrived. The fourth surah of the Qur’an carries the same charge into Omar’s own tradition and into ours: worship God, and serve the parents, and the relatives, and the orphan, and the needy, and the neighbor near and the neighbor far, and the companion at your side, and the traveler on the road. Across every tradition I know, the person who has just arrived is not a problem to be solved but a neighbor to be received. And Jesus, in the only passage where he describes the last judgment, names the stranger among the least of these: I was a stranger and you welcomed me.
Pope Francis, standing on the dock at Lampedusa where bodies come ashore, named the condition that makes a policy like this possible. We have fallen, he said, into globalized indifference. We have become used to the suffering of others: it does not affect me, it does not concern me, it is none of my business. Then he asked for the grace to weep over our indifference, over the cruelty in the world, in ourselves, and even in those who make decisions anonymously that open the way to tragedies like this. That is the spiritual diagnosis of what happened in that house. Not a policy disagreement. A cruelty that has become administratively ordinary.
So let me speak directly, Mr. President, and to the agents who carried out the order. What you are doing is using the law as a weapon against a woman because she criticized you. That is not law and order. Law and order is a real and good thing, and it is also a sentence that can be laid over almost anything, which is why the prophet Jeremiah had a name for sentences like that: they have healed the wound of my people lightly, saying, “Peace, peace,” when there is no peace. And I would ask you, and the men who went into that house, to consider one thing before the next warrant is signed. This woman was a child when this country took her in. Whatever she has said that you dislike, she said it as a citizen, the way citizens are supposed to speak to power. If criticism of the president is now a reason to reopen a naturalization file, then no naturalized citizen in this country is safe, and every one of them knows it, and they are watching you.
The warrant told the rest of us something as well. Agents did not notify Omar or the counsel of the House before the search, and kept her from reaching her own lawyer for more than an hour, and her attorneys say the seizure of her property violated protections a judge had put in place for her legislative work. A sitting lawmaker, unable to telephone her attorney. That is not a technicality to be argued away in the hallway. That is what it looks like when the executive branch has decided that a co-equal branch of government is a suspect.
There is a door here, and I mean it plainly. The passport can be returned. The notebooks and the phone can be returned. The investigation can be closed — not as a favor to her, but as fidelity to what this country says it is. I do not believe any of this is beyond the reach of the people doing it. I have watched men stop. I have watched an order go unexecuted. The men who carried that warrant are persons, and what they did last week is not what they have to do next week.
And the immigration order this column has spent years describing should not exist in the shape it takes: a system in which belonging can be revoked at the pleasure of whoever holds the office. A humane order would do the opposite of this. It would make permanent protection the birthright of every person brought here as a child. It would make citizenship a fact rather than a revocable permission. It would put beyond any president’s reach the question of whether a lawmaker’s criticism of him is a crime. Those are not radical propositions. They are the plain teaching of every tradition quoted above and the ordinary expectation of every kitchen table I have ever sat at.
Romero said it three days before they killed him, standing at the altar in San Salvador: in the name of God, in the name of this suffering people whose laments rise to heaven each day more tumultuous, I beg you, I beseech you, I order you — stop the repression. He said it to men with guns. I am saying it to men with warrants, which is a smaller thing to say, and it is the same thing.
Here is what I keep coming back to at the end of the day, when the tools are on the bench and the shop is swept. They took her passport. That small book says: this person may leave, and this person may come back. Issued by a country that has decided a person is its own. To take it from a woman who has lived here since she was a girl is not law enforcement. It is a sentence that has not yet been pronounced. And until it is returned, there is an empty hook by the door of that house in Washington where it belongs.